A half-horse, half-man pursues a young woman who turns herself into the same figure. Using a spare animation style, Straiton deals with a mythological subject that reveals his personal sense of humour. A beautiful film, set to original music, that is stunning in its simplicity.
Filter Films
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A long myth drawn directly onto the film’s surface, which is painted, dyed, treated so that it will grow controlled crystals and mold – as textures of the figures and forms of the drama – some images stamped thru melted wax crayon techniques, some images actual objects (such as moth wings) collaged directly on the celluloid… so that the protagonists of this myth (as listed in the title) weave thru crystalline structures and organic junglesof the colourful world of hypnogogic vision – edited into “themes and variations” that tell “a thousand and one” stories while, at the same time, evoking Baroque music… the primary musical inspiration being the harpsichord Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. (SB)
Horseman, the Woman and the Moth, The
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The first of its kind in Canada made by an Aboriginal filmmaker, “Honey Moccasin” is set on the fictional Grand Pine Indian Reservation (aka “Reservation X”) and employs a hybrid pastiche of styles that depicts the rivalry between two bars, the Smoking Moccasin and the Inukshuk Cafe, the tale of closeted drag queen/powwow clothing thief Zachery John (illy merasty), and the travails of the crusading investigator/storyteller Honey Moccasin (Tantoo Cardinal). An irreverent parody of familiar narrative strategies, “Honey Moccasin” forges an oppositional aesthetic via its reappropriation of the conventions of melodrama, performance art, cable access, and a “whodunit” style to investigate notions of authenticity, cultural identity, gender roles, and the articulation of contemporary native North American experiences.
Honey Moccasin
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“Homebelly” combines waking dreams with unsettling fragments of this and that. An icy soundscape is set to a live-action animated drama featuring a sleeping body and a persistant rock.
Homebelly
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This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except “0 + 10” going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind’s moving-visual-thinking different from that of the “Roman Numeral Series” or perhaps one should say that the Arabic Numerals come to fruition thru some tree-of nerves separate from that which gave birth to the Romans (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in “layers”). The Arabics range in length from approximately 5 min. to 32 min. and may be projected at 24 fps as well as 18, tho’ the latter speed seems preferable for starts. I think each film’s integrity of rhythm would allow viewing at a greater variety of speeds, were there the 16mm projectors to allow that exercise. So far as I can tell, they defy verbal interpretation (even more than their Roman equivalents) and would, thus, seem to be closer to Music than any previous work given me to do; but if that be true, it is (as composer James Tenney put it to me) that they relate to that relatively small area of musical composition which resists Song and Dance and exists more purely in terms of Sound Events in Time/Space. Finally, then, the inspiration of all those modern (and a few ancient) composers I’ve most loved since my teens overwhelms the easier, and comfortably lovely, habits of jig and do-re-mi AND creates a visual correlative OF music’s eventuality – i.e. each Arabic is formed by the intrinsic grammar of the most inner (perhaps pre-natal) structure of thought itself.
Arabic Numeral Series – Arabic 1
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Step-printed images of a “home” – a suburban house, no people in sight – combine with a children’s story, told in saccarine tones, about the country mouse who discovers that “there’s no place like home.” A gently told tale of alienation.
Home Was Never Like This
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“Here is the quintessential Hancox ‘personal documentary,’ a film in which both the production and role of traditional documentary and autobiographical filmmaking are thrown into question. Using his camera to record a visit out east by train to spend Christmas with the family, Hancox …. used his familiarisation with the annual rtitual as a form of a script… Although we see the journey through the subjective judgement of Hancox’s eyes, it is his intent to transfer the material from original event to camera, to editing, and finally to the audience, so that the personal content of the film… becomes universal.” – Michael Wade, Ontario Film Studies, Cinema Parallel “It is the honesty of portrayal which is staggering, for instead of an idyllic image which many filmmakers present of themselves, Hancox presents (and thus, sees) himself without cinematic make-up… with ‘wild sync’ sound (reminiscent of an early film), and with the use of only available natural light.” – Richard Stanford “‘Home for Christmas’ is a unique exploration of the Canadian mythos – winter, trains, booze, the family and solitude. In penetrating the essence of the mythical, Hancox has combined the home movie with the technological epic, to achieve a profound filmic archaeology of the warmth of Northern existence, in the Pierre Perrault sense, that if you are cold in this country, you must be a tourist.” – Michael Dorland “The most hotly debated of all the personal films shown at the Grierson.” – Ontario Film Association Newsletter
Home for Christmas
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“One of the major achievements of the sixties. Mike Snow postulates an eye that stares at surfaces with such intensity… The image itself seems to quiver, finally gives way under the pressure. A deceptive beginning – silent: a flat white form sharply cut to the silhouette of a walking woman…More human images, love-making – a human epic now still ruled by the after image of the Walking Woman. As in no other film yet seen, its alternately soft and granite images lift us toward the year 2000; capturing not events, not objects, but again and again registering a ‘placement’ of consciousness – the subject matter of the future, really. Human energy on film…” – Richard Foreman, New York Film Co-op
New York Eye and Ear Control
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A poetry film based on Carol Barbour’s poem “Be Careful with Hope”, which was inspired by the Emily Dickinson poem “‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers.” The camera follows a woman moving through an urban nature site. She is mourning a loss and seeking to find hope again. She settles on a bench with a wide view of the surrounding landscape and opens a book that reveals a magical outcome.
Be Careful With Hope
